Cultivating Constructive Cultures:
How to Measure and Leverage Your Firm's Unique Norms and Values

Our premise this month is simple: a fundamental responsibility of law firm leadership is the care and feeding of the firm's culture, often while being buffeted by the winds of rampant change.  We need to push back at the conventional wisdom that supportive, constructive law firm cultures inevitably will go the way of the dodo, that pretty soon it's going to be every lawyer for him/herself.  While it's true that many firms are having difficulty sustaining their collegial traditions and historical sense of identity, law firm leaders faced with mergers, galloping growth and geographic diversification should not give short shrift to the enormous impact their firm's culture can have -- both on morale and on economic success.

The firms that will stand apart, compete successfully, prevail economically, and attract top talent are the ones that pay explicit attention to defining, supporting and fine-tuning the positive aspects of their firm culture.  Their leaders will take a hard and continuing look at the informal forces and factors that shape their lawyers' (and their non-lawyers') morale, level of trust and commitment, responsiveness, willingness to collaborate, and ability to embrace change. Oh, and pride. Let's not forget pride, provided we can leverage it to support the firm's overall success.

More important, rather than viewing their culture as an interesting but irrelevant anthropological artifact, savvy leaders will use their firm's culture as a  tool -- a practical lever for "brand-building," maximizing retention and wooing top talent away from shops with indifferent or unpleasant cultures.

Historically, a law firm's culture had meaning to its lawyers but limited relevance to its clients. Despite glowing accounts, especially from legal elder statesmen, about "life in the old days" when lawyers were collegial and each firm had its own unique personality, few firms regarded their particular norms and style as anything but the identifying attributes of their particular club.

This quaint view of law firm culture is changing, simply because it must - and fast. Law firms aren't clubs or lockstep sinecures anymore; they are aggressive economic engines that are rapidly growing, rapidly diversifying and rapidly morphing through wholesale in-migration and out-migration of their lawyers. Social values have faded in importance because so few lawyers have enough face-time to socialize; but operational norms are taking center stage, and these days a firm's culture is better described as "the informal forces that define the way we do things around here," rather than as "the values that shape who we are."  

The topic of law firm culture therefore is taking on greater practical new significance. As a firm faces outward to its clients and market competitors, ideally its culture becomes an essential marketing attribute -- it can be a "differentiator" instrumental in shaping the "brand" that the firm so ardently showcases to potential consumers. And as the firm looks inward, its culture - it's internal "game face" - ideally will serve as a powerful tool for fostering lawyer commitment, increasing motivation, creating appropriate incentives, and, particularly important these days, reducing attrition.  Conversely, firms with negative, nasty, indifferent or "eroded past glories" cultures face difficulties in presenting a coherent and positive face to their younger lawyers. In the eyes of youthful cynics, these firms may become merely "just a place for me to do my thing."

Just What Is a Culture?

The traditional definition of an organization's culture is "that set of shared values, informally defined but powerfully felt, that shape our collective view of who we are and how we should behave."  I have no quarrel with this time-honored definition except to note that it's pretty broad and pretty vague, and that this broad-brush definition ignores a fundamental aspect of human nature: the pursuit of individual self interest. I believe all lawyers, like all humans, subscribe to the "WIIFM Principle." That stands for "what's in it for me?"  Unless they are martyrs, people will not long pursue behaviors that serve their organization's interests but not their own. That seems particularly true of lawyers, many of whom are autonomous, skeptical, slow to trust and, these days, quick to consider moving elsewhere.

Accordingly, let me advance what I call the "atomic" (as in atoms) definition: a culture is "the sum of all individual decisions made at any given moment about whether what's going on around here is in my best interests or not."  In other words, each lawyer thinks, "if our informal norms of behavior align with my interests, I'll buy-in and support the program.  If they don't, sooner or later I will check out.  If I'm not sure whether they do or not, I may appear to play along, but I'm likely to rein in my commitment, drop into my silo, and/or start exploring my options."

Viewed broadly, cultures can be positive, negative or undergoing transformation.  Positive cultures -- everyone happily singing from the same page -- are wonderful: they inspire pride, trigger energy, foster collaboration and teach constructive behaviors and attitudes to the new kids. They are pretty rare these days. They also are notoriously frail and cannot be taken for granted: unless defined, attended and supported, positive cultures tend to erode into subcultures, political infighting and empty catch-phrases.  Negative (or self-protective) cultures, on the other hand, tend to foster passive, rigid, skeptical, or even downright nasty attitudes throughout the firm. At a time where collaboration is becoming increasingly important in the practice of law, they promote aggressive self-interest or self-promotion. In such cultures, everyone agrees that things are a mess: bunkered, siloed, out-of-control, mean-spirited or unpleasantly overcontrolled.  Sadly, negative cultures are very resilient and hard to turn around. As a leader, you can't simply legislate "nice."

Transformational Cultures (I used to call them "crisis cultures" but that was alarming to many Chicken Littles) emerge during periods of uncertainty or major change -- which certainly describes today's legal profession and the posture of many law firms.  Transformational cultures may look like negative cultures, because they are very "noisy:" there's lots of energy on the loose, but it may be undirected or unfocused. But these transitional periods can be marked by enormous excitement and sense of opportunity, particularly if change is being driven from within, rather than by uncontrollable external forces.  And particularly if the transition is being well led - which in this case primarily means overcommunication and collaboration with all the individuals who have skin in the game.

Monitoring Culture as a Leadership Challenge

The atomic definition, of course, presents a huge leadership challenge: how does a legal leader monitor all these individual self-interest decisions (at all lawyer levels) when the firm is growing from scores to hundreds or even thousands of lawyers? How does a leader take roll call of the opinions of all stakeholders and time-keepers (and administrative staff, of course, because their morale affects that of the firm, too)? In Leading Leaders, Tufts Law School professor Jeswold Salacuse points out that one-on-one personal encounters are vital in building the relationships needed to instill trust and take the WIIFM pulse of what he calls "elite followers."  True, true -- but it's a lot of work to audit the attitudes of hundreds of cats, much less herd them all.

The leader's challenge in parsing his firm's culture is further complicated by several factors. First, the halo-effect: direct inquiries from on high about "how things are going" or "how are we doing at keeping you engaged?" may elicit less-than-candid or less-than-comprehensive responses, especially from younger lawyers.

Second, cultures tend to fall into the "I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it" category. Ask most lawyers to describe the operative norms and values that define "the way we do things around here" or "the messages we send to incoming lawyers," and you a likely to get either mush or hogwash.  "It's…ah…pretty good," they may say.  Or, "except for those jerks in Tucson, we work okay together." Or they may parrot the inspirational claptrap in the firm brochure: "We take pride in the excellence of our lawyers, our responsiveness and the quality of our legal service."  Try selling that one to your first-year associates as a guideline for appropriate and professional behavior. What is needed is an objective, value-neutral set of categories and criteria for mapping the firm's culture, but that can be tough when the subject at hand is rooted in emotional feelings.

Third, cultures are complex.  Both individually (remember WIIFM?) and collectively, a firm's culture can reflect a bewildering mix of objective factors and subjective opinions, long-held traditions and current events, attitudes about compensation, change, personal incentives and career prospects, opinions about leadership, and even the overall direction of the legal profession. It can suggest the balance the firm is perceived as striking between stability/security and growth/risk, between human values and business imperatives, between established and emerging powers, between interests of  the boomers, the Gen Xers, and the Gen Ys.

Sure, we can generalize by saying that overall our culture operates positively, negatively or ambivalently, but that is not the same as identifying - and prioritizing - all its ingredients and understanding how forcefully each ingredient expresses itself in day-to-day firm life. A related issue is that cultures are rarely all positive or entirely negative.  Firms typically display a mixed bad of norms and values, some of which deserve to be reinforced and others are best consigned to the dustbin of firm history. 

Cultures and Mergermania

I should note that the inability either to articulate one's own firm's cultural drivers or to readily assess another firm's is creating real heartburn in the scores of merger negotiations now marking the legal landscape.  True, most merger-planning checklists have an item called "assessing cultural alignment," but the process used to do that often is subjective, sketchy and imprecise.  "We're pretty good guys and they seem like pretty good guys" is not a sound basis for shaping a new and amalgamated climate where all lawyers - particularly those from divergent traditions - will commit, collaborate and thrive.

A major problem in merger-related culture assessment is that all voices may not be polled or heard.  The negotiators may proffer upbeat generalizations on behalf of all their lawyers, often out of their earshot. No one wants to be the deal-killer by highlighting the elitism, dog-eat-dog internecine warfare or abysmal associate morale that may in fact characterize their particular firm. No one wants to reveal that their firm may be plagued with various subcultures that actually divide geographically-dispersed offices, different levels of lawyers, or different practice areas.  The result?  Garbage in, garbage out, culture-wise, which may explain why certain mergers come apart, even if the economic basis for joining forces proves sound.

What?  So What?  Now What?

So…how can a culture be defined and understood in a way that:  1) is takes the broad view without being overgeneral; 2) accurately depicts that diverse factors that shape people's attitudes and behaviors; 3) takes the pulse of all firm levels; 4) distinguishes the relative force of different cultural components; and 5) avoids the charge that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

And once we have mapped out that information…what do we do with it? How do we figure out what our culture's outward shape says or means to our lawyers? How shall we decide which norms are valuable and should be reinforced, and which present operate counterproductively?

The Power of the OCI

In addition to other information-gathering approaches, at Altman Weil, we  are getting enormous utility from one particular culture-mapping instrument, the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI). Developed by Human Synergistics, the OCI can be taken online quickly and confidentially by any number of respondents to provide a vivid snapshot of any organization's current culture. Respondents are not asked to describe themselves or their particular preferences; they are asked to describe the attitudes and behaviors the organization expects or requires in order for its members to survive or succeed.

The OCI describes 12 distinct cultural scales and the degree to which each shapes an organization's present "human climate." It distinguishes between positive/proactive factors and self-protective/reactive attitudes, as well as describing the balance the culture strikes between task-oriented attitudes and people-oriented or relationship-oriented values.  Respondent data can be configured both to provide an aggregate picture of all respondents' viewpoints and to break out the responses of any sub-group, whether by level, geography, or practice area.

We have found the OCI to be a practical and cost-effective way to: 1) Objectively depict the forces and factors that currently are shaping an organization's overall culture;  2) interpret an organization's need and tolerance for change and/or validate the perceived need for change; and 3) determine the degree of similarity or alignment between a certain demographic or geographic group's perception of itself and the organization's overall cultural drivers.

Yeah, But What Does it Mean?

Although tools like the OCI can define the "what" of a firm's culture, they obviously don't know how or why that culture evolved as it did.  While one can infer that very pronounced scores reflect very powerfully held attitudes, one cannot automatically equate high scores with positively-regarded norms and low scores with attitudes or behaviors considered unimportant or unconstructive. Accordingly, even the most rigorous culture audit requires a crucial next step: skilled interpretation, that is drawing conclusions without jumping to conclusions.

Certainly, a "culture map" such as the OCI can focus a firm's attention on highly-charged areas -- positive or otherwise. It can suggest the leadership and management styles like to work best in this culture -- or that will foster a better culture. It can be used to plan and monitor professional development efforts pertaining to morale, "people skills," or "emotional intelligence."

Armed with the OCI map, a firm, whether by itself or working with outside consultants, can then employ one or more techniques to take a hard look at the practical impact "soft" cultural factors. Polling senior management or practice group leaders is an important first step, but, as noted above, it may produce a skewed picture if used alone. Focus groups can be time and cost-effective, but may suffer from the chilling effect of participants being reluctant to be completely candid in a group setting. If used, in order to paint a complete picture, focus groups should slice the firm both my level and by practice area - and also perhaps by geography. 

Questionnaires using rating scales to describe a variety of cultural factors specific to a particular firm, can be very useful, if well constructed and if confidentiality is assured to respondents (an assurance external consultants may be better positioned to provide). Questionnaires can, however, be cumbersome if administered in very large numbers, raising the practical questions of who should be surveyed, who should interpret them, and how conclusions should be fed back to the firm.

Survey questions can take the form of a factual statement (e.g., "our firm has a strongly centralized power structure") requesting a "strongly agree, agree somewhat, neither agree nor disagree, disagree somewhat, strongly disagree" answer.  Alternatively, a question may simply ask for a rating (often 1-10) of how significant a certain factor (e.g., "respecting colleagues at all levels and with diverse styles and attributes") is in the firm's self-definition.  A caveat with such quantitative measures (which lawyers love for their apparent objectivity): by creating an averaged aggregate score, the survey may have the effect of under-reporting outlying scores and creating a greater sense of consensus than my in fact exist.

In contrast with such "quantitative" approaches (or sometimes to supplement them), on occasion I have gotten "the real skinny" through informal interviews with various opinion leaders. I call this the "Columbo" approach, and while it cannot be trusted to provide either objective or comprehensive information, it can elicit powerful, highly-personalized viewpoints that go straight to the heart of WIIFM.  Such anecdotal interviews can help reveal issues, beliefs or attitudes that then can be built into broad-scale survey tools.

In addition, interviews with clients can be useful in probing how a firm's style, morale and cultural cohesiveness are perceived from the outside. Interviews with lawyers or staff  that have departed the firm also may unearth some telling skeletons and horror stories, but the objectivity of the respondent must be considered along with their candor.

How Do We Change Our Culture?

Specific strategies and tactics for altering a firm's culture, short term or long term, are beyond the scope of this column, although we will consider them in the future. But we can say this much now: because cultures evolve informally and are built on subjective, emotionally-driven variables (e.g., trust, motivation, opportunity, security, affiliation needs, achievement needs, etc.), they cannot be legislated or reduced to some sort of cultural policy and procedures manual.  I told one firm recently that its associates' request for an "official culture" was an oxymoron; what the associates really were looking for was better, more consistent information about the rules of appropriate behavior and the pathways to success.

Positive, productive, commitment-fostering cultures invariably use the carrot rather than the stick, and they spend a lot of effort determining the best carrot to use. They talk the talk, and then they walk the talk. They strive for transparency in decision-making and communication. They show they understand the needs and priorities of the successor generation. Their leaders remain accessible, remain  accountable and act  with  scrupulous integrity.  And  almost no one wears that T-shirt that
says, "beatings will continue until morale improves."

SIDEBAR
OCI: Ingredients of a Culture's "Recipe"
In a visual representation called a "circumplex," the OCI maps the relative strength of 12 distinct patterns that, when considered together, create each organization's unique cultural "recipe."

Achievement Cultural Pattern: Evident in organizations that place a premium on excellence and that encourage lawyers to set their own goals.  These cultures generally appear "healthy", set realistic goals, focus on constructive priorities and develop good plans to reach these goals.

Competitive Cultural Pattern: Notable in organizations where individuals are encouraged to outperform one another as a means to competitive advantage.  Tends to foster lawyers operating as "individual contributors," rather than as collaborative team players who share responsibilities and successes. Strongly discourages collaboration.

Affiliative Cultural Pattern:  Characteristic of highly people-oriented organizations that place a high priority on developing interpersonal relationships, highly-motivated teams and strong social bonds.  Members tend to be friendly, open, and sensitive to the needs and priorities of others.  Fosters open communication and a positive attitude toward diverse groups and individuals.

Self-Actualizing Cultural Pattern: Places a strong and explicit value on creativity, innovation, on quality over quantity, and fosters individual growth/self-actualization. Lawyers are actively encouraged to gain enjoyment from work, develop themselves, be lifelong learners, take on "stretch" goals and challenges, and pursue variety.  Such cultures can be hard to control, but are regarded as stimulating, challenging and exciting to those in them.

Conventional Cultural Pattern:  Notable in organizations where personal safety and security are pursued by adhering to conventional, rule-defined or conformist behaviors and demeanor.  Status and conformity become primary motivational drivers, often at the expense of creativity, innovation and individual initiative. Loyalty and commitment to the organization is evident (and expected).

Perfectionistic Cultural Pattern: Seen in organizations that value hard work for its own sake and communicate the message that individuals must perform every task equally well.  In contrast to achievement-oriented cultures, perfectionistic cultures discourage people from setting their own goals; priorities are imposed by the expectations of others.  This pattern can produce high levels of achievement, but also promote anxiety and burnout.

Power-seeking Cultural Pattern: Characteristic of organizations that promote dominance and aggressive displays of power based on rank, position and authority. Frequently seen in hierarchical organizations or groups with a strong top-down or parental approach to management that does not encourage discussion or input from others. Primary behavioral norm is compliance with orders, rather than interactive collaboration.

Humanistic-Encouraging Cultural Pattern: Notable in highly-collaborative cultures that place strong emphasis on helping all lawyers develop and grow, and that engender high morale and strong commitment among younger members.
  
Approval-Seeking Cultural Pattern: Characteristic of cultures in which members exhibit a strong drive to be liked and strive to win the approval of others as a primary motivation. Members tend to appear very polite and deferential, but at the expense of candor and direct, honest feedback to others.

Dependent Cultural Pattern:  Evident in organizations that are generally averse to risk and where group thinking and decision-making tend to protect individuals against the risks of taking individual responsibility and accountability.  Members may appear passive, compliant and reluctant to operate on their own initiative.

Avoidant Cultural Pattern:  Evident in organizations or groups that are averse to interpersonal conflict or confrontation, and therefore tend to withdraw or avoid uncomfortable personal situations.